Do some surgical implants do more harm than good? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/do-some-surgical-implants-do-more-harm-than-good/ <comment><USER2> A registry is a plausible idea, but in general, this article seems to assume by default that regulators are always wise and benevolent, and companies are always scheming, wicked villains. This year's coronavirus pandemic has showed that we can't just assume this. Eg., the FDA made it illegal for labs to develop their own coronavirus tests, which let the disease spread:

[https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/23/dan- crensh...](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/23/dan-crenshaw/did- fda-regulations-slow-testing-coronavirus/)

Distilleries have been trying to make hand sanitizer, but the FDA has made this much more difficult by requiring that the alcohol be denatured first:

[https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/distillers-lawmakers- pressur...](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/distillers-lawmakers-pressure-fda- revise-hand-sanitizer-guidelines/story?id=69918064)

Companies developed at-home coronavirus tests, but the FDA shut them down:

[https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/21/fda-warns-new-home- coron...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/21/fda-warns-new-home-coronavirus- tests-unauthorized/)

(the FDA later approved one by LabCorp - at-home testing does in fact work - but this took almost a month, and AFAICT the original sellers still haven't been approved)

The Apple Watch has the ability to test blood oxygenation, which would be incredibly useful now, but it can't because that would be an illegal medical device:

[https://www.city-journal.org/fda-blocks-apple-watch-blood- ox...](https://www.city-journal.org/fda-blocks-apple-watch-blood-oxygen- feature)

<comment><USER3> It is also not prudent to assume that regulators are always scheming, wicked villains, or power hungry idiots or whatever. For example, in your distillery link the FDA explains that incidents of kids eating hand sanitizer are up since the pandemic.

<comment><USER4> That's not a problem that should be solved by poisoning ("denaturing") the alcohol.

<comment><USER5> The article is a little bit confusing on the nature of denaturing.

Alcohol can be denatured by making it literally unsafe to drink (methanol, gasoline, etc), or by making it really unpalatable (denatonium benzoate, vinegar, etc), or both. The list of agents and formulae are here: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/part-21](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/part-21)

Balancing the safety effects of kids eating hand sanitizer vs. the safety effects of not having enough hand sanitizer is tough, but insisting on a bitterant doesn't strike me as totally indefensible.

<comment><USER4> Oh, ok. I guess bittering is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Schneider writes, "It is more likely for Toyota to know about faulty exhaust > pipes in a Prius than DePuy [medical device company] to understand how a new > hip implant is performing in the United States." A registry of implants > would enable the F.D.A., doctors, and patients to access data on their risks > and benefits over time, but the U.S. has no such registry, unlike Canada, > Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and several countries in Europe. Schneider > emphasizes how these systems provide "valuable information about the > longevity of an implant when used in real-world conditions by all surgeons." > A registry prevents surgeons from "cherry-picking" to exclude cases that > would sully papers about implants they may have designed, and protects > against the gaming of data.

> Repeated efforts to implement a registry system in the United States have > failed. The implant industry has a powerful lobby in Washington, and the > courts and recent legislation have made regulatory oversight more feeble.

Wonder about the history of this. Which lobby groups are making it hard to build a registry?

<comment><USER6> Because generally speaking:

1\. People care about keeping medical information private.

2\. Having people opt into making their medical information public would skew the data.

3\. Your doctor can't be arsed to update a global registry every time you go to him for a checkup. In the long run, you have a relationship with your GP, not the surgeon who put the implant in.

4\. And yeah, I assume the implant industry would like to have the aegis of the high trust people place in the medical profession, without having to do the hard work of earning that trust.

<comment><USER7> 5\. They don't want to generate evidence that can be used in a class action lawsuit.

Feigned ignorance is a great defense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "... if a device was sold before 1976, an updated version can be released without new clinical trials, so long as the manufacturer deems it to be 'substantially equivalent' to the existing device. Thirty years after the 1976 legislation was passed, the F.D.A. had approved more than a thousand high-risk devices, only sixteen per cent of which had gone through rigorous clinical testing before sale."

Shades of Boeing here. Interesting.

<comment><USER9> It's not really shades of boeing, though I can see how it may look like that from the outside.

The problem is that a pre-market assessment (PMA) is a huge and expensive beast, if you require every device/implant/etc. to go through that it will definitely slow things down a lot and make them more expensive...

So the pre-market notification and de-novo paths were created to keep rigor in the system without adding years and millions to development costs of everything. For the most part it works fairly reasonably to balance these concerns.

There is already a classification system (I, II, III) which captures this and can force your device through a PMA if it is deemed high enough risk.

One could argue that class II is being used to much I suppose, but that is a very different issue than pointed at by boeing.

<comment><USER10> I must be missing something. That sounds almost exactly like the Boeing situation to me.

<comment><USER9> It's a rigorous process, that is designed to remove or reduce the need for a different rigorous process. It's been working pretty well for decades.

How is that parallel to the Boeing situation? We know there was an engineering failure followed by a process failure wrt 737 max.

If we have similar evidence in devices (i.e. the process isn't working, or the developers are cutting corners, or both) that should certainly be addressed. But drawing that line with information such as this article seems a stretch, at best.

<comment><USER11> Forgive me, but I also had the same thought as OP and honestly can't tell the difference between what you are describing and Boeing.

> It's a rigorous process, that is designed to remove or reduce the need for a > different rigorous process. It's been working pretty well for decades.

Just like the FAA and Boeing until it didn't?

> We know there was an engineering failure followed by a process failure wrt > 737 max.

My reading of the situation was a process failure, a couple of engineering screw ups, and possibly user error.

<comment><USER9> How are the both of you not included all regulatory oversight in the same bucket?

Could the FDA process become weaker to the point of a problem, sure. Is there any evidence that it currently is? I haven't seen any. Is this something they (the FDA and similar) should keep an eye on, absolutely

Honestly, I don't see how you are drawing the parallel. In what wad do you think the FDA is making the "same" mistake as the FAA did?

<comment><USER8> Ah, well, the FAA did not make Boeing go through recertification for the new "version" of the plane. Close enough. Same thing. Did it back then, should be alright. And so the safety process was not seen through on this new model.

Similarly, the FDA grandfathered in a bunch of devices and because they are "substantially equivalent," the FDA did not ask for recertification and the safety process was not gone through for these devices.

<comment><USER9> What I am saying is I think that your last paragraph is a misunderstanding of what the 510(k) and de-novo pathways are, and that they are a safety process, which was and is followed.

If you argued that the V&V necessary for a 510(k) filing is insufficient, I would understand where you are coming from, and it could be interesting.

If you argued that a PMA is needed for all medical devices, I would understand the argument but probably disagree.

Your 'similarly' just isn't that similar, unless I've vastly misunderstood the FAA/Boeing case.

Again it's clear that the FDA _could_ fall into a state where it's review and audit processes had the same sort of problems that the FAA exhibited with the 737max. But I don't see evidence at all that this has actually happened.

What do you think the substantively equivalent bar for a 510(k) allows a company to do?

Regulatory capture is a real risk for any regulatory oversight, but it is not synonymous with that regulatory oversight.

<comment><USER11> > What I am saying is I think that your last paragraph is a misunderstanding > of what the 510(k) and de-novo pathways are, and that they are a safety > process, which was and is followed.

I don't think anyone in this chain has tried to claim that the 510(k) is not a safety process nor that it is not followed - merely that avoiding more rigorous testing and review of a new device by tying it to the safety rating of a previous device sounds exactly like what happened with boeing's 737 max, and secondly, that existing regulations incentivize bad outcomes whereby companies make more expensive/dangerous/worse products that get less testing.

> What do you think the substantively equivalent bar for a 510(k) allows a > company to do?

Honestly, I have _literally_ no idea, and have been trying to tease that information out of you. Specifically, how does that bar differ from the one that Boeing had to clear with the 737 Max took which took 5 years and a few billion dollars (I don't know how much of that was for compliance, but we can guess its at least 10s of millions).

This is literally the first article I found when I searched google:

[https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/boeings-737-max-...](https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/boeings-737-max- crisis-why-the-medical-device-industry-should-care)

<comment><USER9> > and have been trying to tease that information out of you

I really didn't get that from your comments. I will try.

1st off I'm no expert in aerospace regulation or anything like it so perfectly happy to be wrong, but my assumption is this: The 737max issue arose because of a combination of two things. 1 the engineering standards at Boeing have been eroded (so they cut corners) and 2) the FAA has been subject to regulatory capture to the degree that they did not catch this (or did not/could not act effectively when they did). If I'm wrong here please advise.

Now I suspect there are a lot of differences in how broadly these things are applied so I will try and draw as close a parallel as I can. Imagine you and I have a med dev company and we are building a new version of a device X, call it X2, and we are using a self-predicated 510(k) to do it. When we file that we still have a full system V&V. We have a hazard analysis that can included everything for X, but must focus on any functional differences between X and X2, We run all our system trace & testing, produce he documentation, and file it with the FDA panel. Now if the panel don't like anything in the V&V (or the rest of the filing) they can ask use to support it better, and that includes the previously covered aspects. If they think the predicate is too much of a stretch they can kick it back. If we can't make them comfortable they can push it to refile with new methods or a to a full PMA (i.e. clinical trials) and force us to go the whole route (along with anyone else doing the same thing, they can't just target our company). We absolutely can propose pretty much anything to address the variations in our machine, but they don't have to accept any of them.

So I can see how we might pressure our engineers to cut corners, and we can see how we might paper it over to file. But I can't see the mechanism where the FDA fails to do it's part (or for that matter, how a clinical trial would have caught everything that might be missed that way).

Make sense?

Again, I'm not saying the FDA couldn't have such a problem, all regulatory bodies can. I just don't see evidence that it _does_ have this problem. And the narrative that the creation of a 510(k) path was due to regulatory capture seems pretty weak, for what it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The answer to any question of the form "Do some X interventions do more harm than good?" is always "Well yes, but is it a statistically significant amount?"

This is a set of anecdotes and editorializing about a very statistical kind of question.

</comment><comment><USER13> Makes one wonder - in the absence of thorough regulation, why a third-party evaluator hasn't arisen to provide real risk analysis for patients regarding each device (the good device seal) - and I'm surprised insurance companies aren't more aggressive in ensuring that they aren't making the patients worse 9which would increase their insurance costs).

<comment><USER14> My theory is that insurance companies don't try to save money as long as they can pass the cost to the patient or whoever pays the premiums. Otherwise I can't explain the insanity of the charges hospitals are getting away with.

<comment><USER15> If your limited to a certain percentage of costs as your profits, you have an incentive to increase costs. Hospitals and insurance enter into an unholy pact to increase costs implicitly as a result.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't gaming the system to increase profits by increasing costs show malevolent motives which would not be fixed by removing profit restrictions? I mean if you're "evil" with regulations, why should I trust that removing regulations will make you "less evil"? It sounds like a crook asking you to remove the handcuffs.

<comment><USER17> Removing the profit regulations has less to do with enabling greed (which exists either way) than it does with aligning incentives.

The idea is that you want the insurance companies to profit from patients getting timely, cost-effective care, rather than incentivizing them to drive up costs and delays.

<comment><USER14> If you remove the profit regulations insurances will keep doing exactly what they are doing now while making more profit. The won't pass savings to the patient unless forced to do so. Health care is just a very bad area to apply regular economics. As far as I know most countries have some kind of price control including the US with Medicare.

<comment><USER17> You are proposing a cost spiral due to greed; why doesn't this happen in every industry which provides 'essentials' but has no profit-limiting regulations?

Examples would be grocery stores, clothing, transportation, etc. You can say 'this one is different' about every single industry, but why does that difference matter?

<comment><USER14> Because in all these industries pricing is relatively clear, customers have some level of understanding of the product and they can choose between competitors. In US health care you have zero pricing information, the employer chooses insurance based on their needs, not the patient's, and people are not in a position to judge the quality of procedures so they do what the doctor tells them. It's not a functioning market and probably can't be.

<comment><USER17> Employer-provided healthcare is a result of tax policy, so it is tough to blame that on insurance companies.

The average person understands much more about healthcare products than they do about transportation products. Your car is made up of >20k components, and extremely intricately designed. Understanding the factors that go into a reliable car requires a fairly advanced understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy, fracture mechanics, electronics, software engineering, statistics, and manufacturing. Most healthcare is comparatively primitive.

If you're worried about the quality of procedures (as I am), it's a doctor/hospital issue, not an insurance issue. Doctors have very effectively avoided oversight, and they often cause huge problems for their patients. The leading cause of death in hospitals in medical error.

<comment><USER14> "Employer-provided healthcare is a result of tax policy, so it is tough to blame that on insurance companies."

Agreed. However, they make a very good living off this and will fight to keep things that way.

When you buy a car, you know all competitors, their prices, there is ton of information about maintenance, durability and all other factors that may cost you money. In healthcare you get none of this.

I am not trying to single out one factor in health care. Insurers, providers, pharmaceuticals and the various middlemen are all guilty of making an excellent living off this insanely stupid system on the back of patients who suffer from it health wise and financially. Where it gets evil is the fact they lobby for keeping things that way by spreading a lot of misinformation.

<comment><USER17> The ones making the real money in healthcare are the doctors and nurses, who have been very successful in restricting competition. Doctors and nurses in the USA (and to a lesser extent Canada) make far more money than they do almost anywhere else in the world (in either absolute or relative terms). Doctors have also been successful in preventing/avoiding tracking their results; some are much worse than others, but it is very tough to find out how good/bad they are.

Hospitals and clinics in some states have been very successful in reducing competition, to the extent that you often need permission from your competitors to open a new one. Hospitals have also avoided much scrutiny by avoiding cost-accounting, which is a very interesting tactic.

Pharmaceuticals and insurance companies are the bogey-men of the industry, but they're not as profitable as most imagine, and their high overheads are largely due to regulatory burden.

<comment><USER14> You are making the mistake of singling out one participant. In the US health system all players are making "the real money". The only exception is the patient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One obvious variable that is not mentioned in the article, and is a contributing factor to case outcomes, is surgical technique.

I work in the medical device industry and have observed (live, bedside), plenty of laparoscopic surgeries and have seen plenty of good surgeons and also many bad ones.

I'm not defending the medical devices (every company I've worked at has had recalls and devices fail, injuring people), but the reality is that the implant is only as good as it is placed.

</comment><comment><USER19> """For much of Western history, however, surgery lay somewhat apart from the practice of medicine. Hippocrates was leery of it, writing, "He who wishes to be a surgeon should go to war"; the crude practices of the battlefield were, as Roy Porter put it in his classic history of medicine, "Blood and Guts" (2002),"the work of hand not head." This suspicion bred an enduring medical division of labor, in which many healers viewed surgery as inferior. Well into the modern era, surgical procedures were the province of the barber, along with pulling teeth."""

Even now sometimes I wonder is surgery a science? Does it use the scientific method?

<comment><USER14> I am not sure how much the scientific method applies to medicine in general. Medicine is a very diffuse subject.

But I work in medical devices and I know for sure that there isn't much data available of how well a procedure works. There is no centralized database that tracks outcomes. Most surgeons view a surgery as success if the surgery as such went well. They don't do much tracking of whether the patient is doing better so there is risk they will keep doing surgeries that don't really work. The manufacturer gets some information but also not much.

There definitely should be a countrywide or even better worldwide database of outcomes.

<comment><USER20> There are many centralized databases in the US that track outcomes (e.g. [https://www.sts.org/registries-research-center/sts- national-...](https://www.sts.org/registries-research-center/sts-national- database)).

<comment><USER14> I know for sure that my company doesn't have great long term data about its own devices in the field and even less about competitors. Once implanted, most patients disappear.

<comment><USER20> The hospitals buying your devices probably do, depending on the device. Our long term data is incomplete because people can switch providers, but we actively monitor long term patient outcomes for a wide range of devices that we use.

<comment><USER14> But how do you get data from thousands of hospitals? I also assume hospitals don't exchange much data. The data is just very fragmented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone who's seen TV commercials in the past several years ("Attention surgical mesh patch implant patients!") must be aware that the answer is "no".

Likewise for OTC and prescription drugs, cleaning products, garden products, pet foods, etc. Companies do not always have your best interests in mind. Class-action lawsuits are good at showing how bad they can be.

</comment><comment><USER21> Much of the risk in implants is not tied to concept or design, but rather execution. The final product has been distorted to some degree by market forces (cost/profitability, application domains, viable hosts), and this reflects, I believe, in the majority of harmful use cases that we observe.

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x53DnZC1JKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x53DnZC1JKE)

</comment><comment><USER23> My mother went in for a fusion on her spine and came out with MRSA and died from it. In this case the cure was worse than the disease.

<comment><USER24> Your situation is tragic and I'm saddened by the loss, but fatal infection is orthogonal to the subject of the article. MRSA infection is a procedural error not caused by the implant itself.

<comment> kube-system The article discusses infection risk. Infection risk is an inherent part of the total risk associated with any medical procedure. It is not separable -- you cannot use an implant if it is not implanted.

<comment><USER13> Sadly, horribly, that is now a risk with every major procedure - but at least it's a known risk that the patient can choose to accept when the underlying condition is not life threatening. Devices that don't work properly and haven't been properly reviewed by the FDA are risks the patient can't reasonably evaluate.

<comment> kube-system > Sadly, horribly, that is now a risk with every major procedure

Infection always has and likely always will be a risk when you open up a human. Evaluating, understanding, and measuring those risks is the only way we can begin to mitigate them.

On the bright side, recent medical technology has also brought us a lot of minimally or non-invasive procedures. Those generally have much lower (sometimes almost zero) risks of infection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Surgery ruined my life and will be the cause of it's end. I was scared into having surgery I didn't need and told if I did not I would be crippled by middle age. Multiple opinions got multiple variations on what should be done but I was too young and inexperienced to know better. It stole everything from me and has caused so much physical and mental pain as I tried to survive it and society and people turned their backs on me. Then when I became the very thing I was told to fear in all ways...and there was no way out...I tried to end my life and even THAT was denied me and now its all worse.

People love to talk about "worth the risk and cost" etc when they have no TRUE idea what the risk and cost are. People love to justify, explain, defend those who do the damage and love to blame, demean, and ignore those who suffer it. Nice little just world package to feel safe and smart. I wish I had never gone to a doctor and I wish I had known the realities of medical mistake frequency and unneeded surgery instead of the whitewashed nonsense that is sold.

Even now...post suicide attempt...the system and people are just proving what I believed was true all along...but being correct doesn't bring me any solace or pain relief.

*I understand it's bad form to complain about voting...but when your life is so painful and full of invalidation by family, society, and "professionals" even a person pushing a button to further invalidate you hurts and just reinforces what you believe about ego and selfishness in others. Being "right" or in control is always more important than others to most people. I just cannot fathom the thinking of kicking someone who is down over their experience or a generalized comment. Even if I disagreed with someone I wouldn't do that.

<comment><USER26> > a person pushing a button to further invalidate you hurts

The problem with your post is that you have predicated it entirely on your personal experiences, while being unwilling to describe those experiences in detail. You have not told us, for example, what kind of surgery was performed, what the complications were, who "scared" you "into having surgery" (and how), or what the negative effects on your life were, _specifically_.

You are free to choose not to share this information -- nobody can fairly expect you to share such intimate and painful details. I realize that is very difficult. But without specifics, an account of your personal experiences does not contribute very much to the discussion.

<comment><USER25> "The problem" is always the victim...never the people doing the victimization. This just reinforces that I said and believe. People don't see others as living, feeling humans. They are means to an end and if they don't "contribute to the discussion" in the way they want then they are invalidated. It's one thing to leave people be, it's another to actively push down irl or with voting. It's saying "you don't matter and what you say and do annoys/bothers/irritates me and I need to demonstrate that". I cannot understand such a selfish mindset. But it's my mistake for continuing to believe people are going to be different. Every psychologist etc I have seen has said that most people never grow past the ego driven, narcissistic child phase of emotional maturity, no matter how "intelligent" or "successful" they appear they just cannot have empathy or care about others as emotional beings like them.

If I laid out details...which I have done many times...those details would be ignored, picked apart, invalidated, twisted...and nothing good happens. Occasionally a good soul reaches out and offers support of some sort...but only once in my life has that ever been actionable and beyond "I understand and that sucks". I know it offends people...and I don't even care anymore...but most people are in it entirely for themselves as I have said. Everything they do and say is for their own emotional and physical need and even their seemingly good actions toward others is self serving. My mistake was believing the few mentors and good examples of loving human beings I have been fortunate to know were not unicorns and were just people I had to get out in the world and find. But unicorns they were/are. I learned after my suicide attempt how even when things are at their worst people will still punch down, betray, lie, abuse, cheat, and step on you for their own needs. They prevent people from opting out of life because that scares and angers them...but they refuse to do whats needed to allow those people in need to survive. They just keep you in a nice smoldering fire because that's best for them. But since I AM a feeling human being I cannot just accept it and suffer the fire...I get upset and lash out and speak out...and it just stokes the flames and I regret it. Cannot win...can only hurt.

<comment><USER26> >"The problem" is always the victim...never the people doing the victimization.

You are _not_ being victimized. Your post was downvoted. It is not a big deal. Nothing bad happened to you here today.

>if they don't "contribute to the discussion" in the way they want then they are invalidated.

It is a community norm to downvote posts that do not contribute to the discussion. I like that norm. It's one of the reasons I choose to post here. If you don't like that rule, there may be other discussion boards more suited to you.

>If I laid out details...which I have done many times...those details would be ignored, picked apart, invalidated, twisted...and nothing good happens.

If you choose to assume, before you post anything, that you cannot expect the people here to be reasonable, then there is no reason to post here at all. Why would you expect people to believe you when you give no information, given that you do not expect them to believe you if you do give the information?

Nobody can do anything for you if _you won 't let them_.

<comment><USER25> You cannot even see what you are doing and are proving my point perfectly. You invalidate and minimize what I say. You turn it into something lesser to dismiss. You excuse the things I say bother me. You say it's MY fault there is no help because I am not LETTING that help happen...which is ironically classic and well studied victim blaming.

I am done. I am not going to continue to go back and forth. No matter what I say or do there is reason to interrogate, invalidate, blame. Nothing is every enough for anyone and every answer leads to more questions and more positioning to dismiss. I know you don't agree...don't "believe"...it doesn't matter. For you this is an opportunity to win a debate or show you are smarter or better. That's what people do. My only mistake is beating my head against that same wall of human ego because I am in pain and want to make noise to relieve it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An App Store Experiment Part 4 – Nearing 2M Downloads - <AUTHOR> http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-experiment-part-4

<comment><USER2> Really helpful blog, really good to see some numbers!

Just wondered what are your next plans for the app? Android?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah I have made the basic version for Android. Still a lot to experiment with on iOS though :)

<comment><USER3> Will you eventually be able to post the numbers from Android market as well? Just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! I plan on sharing everything I find. There is a mailing list on my site if you want to keep track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks Stuart. Love reading your updates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Linux Debuggers for C++ Reviewed - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/testing/13-linux-debuggers-for-c-reviewed/240156817?pgno=1

<comment><USER2> This appears to be reviewing IDEs with debugger frontends, not debuggers themselves, though a few integrated commercial debugger packages make a showing among the gdb frontends. Just a heads-up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Nemiver simply because I don't need to have an ide installed to use it.

Ease of setup makes Nemiver really good for when you need to debug something, but don't use an ide with an integrated debugger..

<comment><USER4> It's frustrating reading about this and seeing that it makes all the same mistakes as all these other gdb frontends that make them impossible to use with the standard library.

What the hell is this [https://people.gnome.org/~dodji/vids/variable- tooltip.ogg](https://people.gnome.org/~dodji/vids/variable-tooltip.ogg) ? It's supposed to be showing off how amazing the inspect variable tooltip is but I still have to dig through a veritable warren of template members just to find the underlying value. At least tell me I can write and install my own pretty printers if needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny how IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans) written in Java and used primarily for Java development turned out to be the most functional C++ debuggers and beat dedicated C++ debugger frontends.

<comment><USER6> It's not that funny. Java has reflection mechanisms and C++ has nearly none unless you (ab)use the macro system. This gives Java a huge leg-up when it comes to GUIs.

C++ developers who are interested in better GUI development should work with the standards commmittee's reflection subgroup (SG7), which is headed by Chandler Carruth. I haven't been involved there, but I think it's important work for various domains including this one and database abstraction layers.

[https://isocpp.org/std/the-committee](https://isocpp.org/std/the-committee)

<comment><USER7> Can you explain a little why reflection is important in GUI development?

<comment><USER6> To be clear, in any Turing-complete language you can do anything (more or less). However, many things often require a lot of boilerplate, especially involving metadata: Does it display text? How do you get its name? Does it have its own thread? Does it have any XML-configurable attributes?

Often, especially in C++, that boilerplate is created through code-generating tools (like WYSIWYG editors), which is fine for many use cases... all of the metadata, getters, setters, and wiring logic are churned out for you. There are drawbacks to that approach, including many of the same limitations to WYSIWYG HTML/CSS tools (which I guess is a special kind of GUI development).

One way to improve the situation is to allow for more compile-time and/or runtime dependency injection in C++ code. It's not a silver bullet, but it's a tried-and-true model for other kinds of frameworks in various languages. In other words, why don't we see a Sinatra or a Spring in C++ land? Some people may think this is a feature, not a bug, but I submit the lack of those types of frameworks is due to a limitation of the language, not a lack of interest.

To get to the point of C++ GUI frameworks, however, some basic building blocks are needed. Especially of note are reflection mechanisms. For example, attributes on types, functions, and objects that can be inspected in code (constexpr or not).

This is a fairly involved subject worthy of a series of blog posts (with examples) instead of a single comment in a comment thread. But I hope I got the general idea across.

<comment><USER5> Many of the usecases where reflection is used could be also addressed with metaprogramming. This is probably why so many C++ GUI frameworks still use C macros and/or code generators. So I guess C++ not only needs reflection, but also much better metaprogramming capabilities. Template metaprogramming is considered awesome by some academics (being accidentally Turing-complete), but in fact it is quite limited compared to good macro systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> No mention of Solaris Studio, which is something I've always been curious about. Unlike most (all?) of those others it can use a completely different compiler than gcc or clang.

<comment><USER8> Speaking of Solaris, I'd love if dbx was available on linux.

I haven't used it in years, and don't even remember what was so great about it, I just remember it seemed a lot better than gdb at the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Speaking of Solaris, I'd love if dbx was available on linux.

From the dbx wikipedia page:

 _DBX is included as part of the Oracle Solaris Studio product from Oracle Corporation, and is supported on both Solaris and Linux. It supports programs compiled with the Oracle Solaris Studio compilers and GCC._

The only reason I haven't played with this to satisfy my curiosity is that they are pretty specific about what distributions they support, and they don't support mine.</comment></comment></comment>


Wikileaks co-founder speaks about the "Collateral Murder" video - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sYXppiOteM

<comment><USER2> It's amazing to me that this guy doesn't realize what terrible damage he's doing to Wikileaks' credibility by editorializing this so aggressively. In one swoop they've gone in my mind from neutral champion of transparency to just another advocacy group. It doesn't help if one happens to agree with the advocacy, either; what is destructive is that the ideological agenda is so obvious. (So, it seemed to me watching this, is his smug self-satisfaction.)

What a shame.

<comment><USER3> Spot on. Wikileaks should simply present the information, _NOT_ editorialize, or even analyze beyond verification of veracity.

They are destroying their credibility faster than they're increasing their profile. Effectively they're making this about them, and they are forgetting that they should simply be a neutral conduit.

I have a strong feeling we're watching a pivot in progress, setting up a new domain name and releasing the video there is a big step in that direction.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I totally disagree. I find his comments totally sensible.

<comment><USER5> That's not the point.

Whether you find his comments sensible or reprehensible doesn't alter the fact that he's moving Wikileaks away from its traditional role. In doing so he risks destroying its most compelling feature and diminishing the impact of future leaks.

<comment><USER6> Wikileaks has provided articles about certain leaks when people who them.

I do not understand why people are so eager to blame Wikileaks for doing something wrong with this release. It is showing a gross injustice which has not been shown before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Despite what both the interviewer and Assange say, it's simply not true that Wikileaks has uncovered any meaningful information about this story. They have _not_ broken a US coverup. Virtually every detail in the video has already been disclosed. An article recounting most of the details of the video --- from the killing of the prone reporter to the firing on the apparently unarmed men in the van --- appeared in the Washington Post last year. It even quoted the audio track from the video.

It is also simply not true that Reuters was unable to see this video after filing a FOIA request. Reuters saw the video in 2007. What they were not allowed to do was to retain a copy.

The more I watch of this the clearer it becomes to me that this Wikileaks video release has a lot more to do with Wikileaks than it does with war crimes.

<comment><USER8> Stating that Wikileaks has not uncovered any meaningful information is quite a stretch. It's true that WaPo and NYT have already covered most of the factual details of the incident - the WaPo reporter was supposedly embedded with the troups arriving on the scene shortly afterwards.

You're mixing up your timeline. Reuters staff were able to view the material released by US Central Command (military investigation write-up and selected photographs) and also the video itself once, before they were told to file an FOIA request for it, but their FOIA request for the video was rejected multiple times. The relevant question remained whether the shootings were justified under Rules Of Engagement and also whether what the military stated was true.

I think it is similar to reading about how torture is going on and seeing actual photos of it. To accurately assess what exactly went on, a military investigation write-up is quite different from the actual gunship video.

I agree that one may have quarrels with Wikileaks' methods. But please differentiate between their methods and the material they release.

From NYT 07/13/07: "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad." \- To state that about the incident is misleading at best, and a cover-up at worst, don't you think?

<comment><USER7> How is my timeline mixed up? What does the vividness of the footage have to do with anything? What does an NYT article from July '09 have to do with a WaPo article from September '09?

I'm sorry if I was unclear. I'm certain there was a US coverup. The US military would cover up a paint spill. What I'm saying is that Wikileaks didn't break the coverup; it's been broken for more than 6 months.

Your comment encapsulates my issue with this Wikileaks story. People's justifiable outrage over what the video shows is clearly going to distort their judgement about the news value of the leak.

<comment><USER8> Your timeline was mixed up regarding Reuters seeing the video and their FOIA request.

The news value is that one is now able to objectively verify what happened in the ultimate vicinity of the incident. And that just doesn't add up with what the military told the press. A WaPo reporter writing about footage without being able to show it is something quite different than footage being available for everyone to see.

What I have found on HN is that people's judgement of the video gets distorted by their views about Wikileaks' methods. Their release methods have nothing to do with the validity of their material.

<comment><USER7> I think you and I agree about the Reuters / FOIA timeline.

The press reports I've read about the incident do not seem uncritical about the military's official story. So, I don't know what we're arguing about.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learn the Basics of RBD and SQL - <AUTHOR>

Hi. Since I have just finished my degree in CS I was looking for my first job. Now my biggest concern is my poor knowledge about the SQL and Relational Databases. I am looking for good and concrete courses fast to read but difficult to understand. The level of the courses I am looking for are the same as the papers: "A relational model of data for large shared data banks" and "The entity relationship model". The roots of RDB.<p>Could you help me? <comment><USER2> <http://www.db-book.com/>

It's a website that's meant to accompany a textbook I used in college, but you don't really need the textbook. This site has slides that cover the material well enough to get started. Note that it's relationally-specific almost to a fault, so you won't get a whole lot of insight into NoSQL if you decide you want to go that route later.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got a lot out of Anthony Molinaro's SQL Cookbook, it had a surprising amount of theory in it.

It doesn't sound like you're looking for a cookbook type book though, what I think you're looking for is books by C.J. Date and Joe Celko.

</comment><comment><USER4> Free online course on DB from standford

<http://www.db-class.org/course/auth/welcome></comment>


A Guide to Co-Founder Fit - <AUTHOR> https://fundersclub.com/blog/2016/08/03/finding-your-cofounder/?utm_campaign=Mattermark+Daily+Weekend+Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=32890852&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_aVCVozPQZiC3LoHaqCw20N0BDLvY2scuWUCGL6FxBywqPFHvvvCzJcT-fQpU-cFJwyAC0xNl8Ap0F4siam39xvfgPXA&_hsmi=32890852 <comment><USER2> > Have a 6 month out-clause in case the technical co-founder does not perform.

AND have a 6 month out-clause in case the non-technical co-founder does not perform.

I'm a technical founder, and I was sick of building software that went nowhere ... I was capable of building distributed, complex, bugfree software quickly, but I have no idea how to sell it.

So I searched for a non-technical co-founder, and I was getting sick of people who ended up being all talk and no action.

So I did this : I built 3 smaller products, with markets I knew fit, then I told the non-technical co-founders their job was to sell. Their job was to get relationships going, to get signatures on paper, and to get revenue flowing. No crap, no excuses, no endless feature requests, revenue.

I found a good co-founder this way, this guy is a lot older than me, but could sell ice to Eskimos.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Slicing Pie is a better solution than vesting. It's wrong for a founder to lose their equity if they work hard for ten months and then have a split with a cofounder in the tenth month.

Also I suggest founders earn stock, not options in the early days.

If investors want founders on a vesting plan an ISO plan can be created for them- but the shares they have earned previously are never to be subject to vesting. Unless investors will have their shares best as well. And none of them will because they money they put in is real money.... but so is the sweat founders put in.

<comment><USER4> Why should ten months of work result in a potential payday years later?

<comment><USER5> Many reasons.

You're taking on a risky business venture. You aren't getting a comparable salary that you could obtain at another company. You don't know if it will help, hurt, or be neutral with regard to your future career prospects. A startup is going to more demanding and stressful, and a bigger drain on your life outside of work. You could find yourself pushed out for unfair reasons, while you made legitimate contributions. If the startup fails easy on, you likely won't be eligible for unemployment benefits. All of these risks should be accounted for when considering your compensation.

If you can't accept giving up equity to people who will not be around when the company IPOs, then expect to pay a full market salary with benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are considered to be the best guides for finding a non-technical cofounder as a teachnical person? Almost every guide I've read seems to treat this as easy, yet I found it almost impossible when I tried.

<comment><USER7> Why do you think you need one?

[http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html](http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html)

"Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

...

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem. And once you apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you can create wealth very rapidly"

<comment><USER8> Business isn't UI design, and while it may be a domain that engineers can learn, it's often one that they aren't interested in learning, and, even if they are, the time they spend on the learning curve is a disadvantage to the venture.

<comment><USER7> Read the whole essay. Also, engineers who aren't interested in learning what customers need shouldn't be starting a company.

"Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started."

(side note: I was at Altavista at the time after an acquisition, and that is exactly what happened)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A small nit - in this context it's "complement", not "compliment".

<comment><USER10> When I see an error like this it makes me take the article less seriously.

<comment><USER11> I think the better approach is to think of it like this: [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/). Oh man! There's this other word that very precisely means what you have spent your whole life thinking that other word kinda-sorta also meant! How cool is that??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I could just change a few words in the article and it will work fine as "A guide to Spouse Fit"

</comment><comment><USER13> The graph's wrongly labelled. You may want to fix that.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was hoping this was going to be an article about co founders having a fit. I'm disappointed...</comment>


Hermes Spacecraft Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hermesspace/hermes-spacecraft/posts/215138

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw this on KickStarter. It's great to see people doing hi-tech hardware projects. I'm not sure they're going to make it but 100 people @ $50 and someone can build a bigger rocket engine.</comment>


Inside the Guardian's CMS: meet Scribe, an extensible rich text editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2014/mar/20/inside-the-guardians-cms-meet-scribe-an-extensible-rich-text-editor <comment><USER2> Let me diverge for a moment:

Everytime I see this, I wonder why browsers (and the W3C) don't add more functionality to textarea.

ContentEditable always felt like an ugly hack for me. A rich set of API on textarea could move the web forward. Imagine building an IDE in a textarea. That should be possible.

</rant>

Great work nonetheless, very clean code and very nice documentation!

<comment><USER3> Related: Why isn't there a wrapping version of <input type=text>? For a single line of text which you wish to wrap, using a <textarea> with JS hooks to prevent pressing the return key is a terrible hack. Why can't you do <input type=text wordwrap>? Or <input type=text style="word-wrap: break-word;">?

Also, in this day and age of _sans-serif, variable-width_ fonts, why do we have to specify rows and cols on <textarea>?!

<comment><USER4> Serifs are irrelevant, and browsers have had variable-width fonts since Mosaic, WorldWideWeb and ViolaWWW, so making textareas use a monospaced font and specifying their size like that seems to have been just laziness. If there was a good reason, I'd be interested to know it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my web shop, our first CMS (circa 2003) utilized a WYSIWYG editor which was a disaster. For all of the supposed benefits it brought to the editing / writing process for our clients, the reality is that upon hitting 'save', the style/formatting issues on the front-end were awful, having picked up junk from MS Word, or copied web pages, or massive embedded images, you name it. It threw our shop into perpetual customer-support mode as our clients struggled to get anything to look right, or consistent.

For our 2nd client CMS, we chucked the WYSIWYG, spent a little more time helping our clients understand Markdown (actually Textile - this took a few minutes of our and their time). There was a little squirming involved on the part of our clients, but after a day or so, they understood it. Best part, it just works. It ensures that our site renders perfect, semantically correct HTML!

WYSIWYG in RTEs has grown up a bit, as we can see in Guardian's latest attempt. However, its largest flaw, from our perspective, is that it outputs HTML! HTML is just not a proper end-format. It is too difficult to reverse engineer. Markdown, on the other hand, can be rendered into many format. It can be output as HTML, raw text, truncated text, etc. So, while I applaud Guardian for releasing this, it saddens me that we're still attempting to improve on browser-based, user-facing tools which output HTML.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to read more about the Guardian CMS that Scribe was written for and how the writers find using it. Do they like it?

When I've worked on news sites in the past, many of the journalists preferred writing in their desktop word processor of choice and cutting and pasting into the CMS as the final step before publishing.

The CMS was probably viewed as a necessary evil and I don't remember there being much love for it from the people who had to spend hours in it everyday.

Partly this was due to the CMS not working offline and it just wasn't as pleasant to use as the software the writers have used for years, which is understandable.

<comment><USER7> They're quite happy with it (except when it breaks, understandably). Mostly, they just want it to work as they expect (i.e. like Word or Google Docs), so the goal is for them to not notice it. Doing the Right Thing on paste from GMail or Google Docs (a very frequent use case) is therefore crucial. At the same time, we want to rely on Scribe to enforce correct, standard typography rules, valid markup (unlike if it were free-form HTML), etc.

We're only at the beginning, but the curly quotes plugin mentioned in the blog post is a good example of that. Other ideas in the pipeline include automatically enforcing and converting to UL/LI lists instead of paragraphs with bullet point characters, warning on punctuation issues, etc.

Scribe has also allowed us to integrate contextual options, such as buttons to add images when the caret is on an empty line, or a button to embed any URL pasted into the body.

So the biggest challenge is therefore to provide a reliable UI that responds as one would expect, while allowing extra features to be built on top of it without too much effort.

<comment><USER6> Wow it sounds great and thanks for taking the time for the detailed answer. If there exists now or in the future a screencast or gif of a power user writing an article on the CMS please share it on HN. Although I have a feeling it'd make some devs stuck with an older CMS weep a little.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This does look promising.

Markdown gets a lot of love from developers, but in my experience with clients across many industries (including journalism), it's a non-starter. If you're used to looking at markup in an editor, Markdown is an abstraction you can tolerate. But the average non-technical person tasked with the job of updating a blog or website sees Markdown as something like pig latin - a thing that makes communication more complicated.

<comment><USER9> I hear you. But as somebody used to looking at code in an editor, I actively attempt to avoid wysiwig tools in favour RestructuredText/Markdown, rather than it being "an abstraction I can tolerate", after fighting with formatting in wysiwig editors once too often.

<comment><USER8> WYSIWIG formatting woes are all real, they're just not something users understand. (My head explodes when classes are stripped off of a div every time the form is submitted...)

If I were the King of the Internet and had to choose one tool for text entry it would be a system sort of like Ghost/Prose.io, where you use Markdown, but can see the results. So even laymen can get the swing of the tool developers prefer. As King, I would also levy a tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This pretty much nails it and is very tricky to get right. Nearly every other contenteditable editor out there messes up the undo stack, copy-pasting and new-lines, some more than others. The extensibility feature is also a great relief.

However, I am curious as to their stance on Markdown and if it was ever considered.

<comment><USER7> Markdown was indeed considered, but we ended up rejecting the idea for a variety of reasons. Given the interest around this decision in several comments here, maybe we should write up about it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is awesome. Copying and pasting text from Word files seems to work fairly well, instantly generating HTML with all the cruft removed.

To download it to your desktop and try it out locally get [these files]([https://github.com/guardian/scribe/tree/gh- pages](https://github.com/guardian/scribe/tree/gh-pages))

<comment><USER12> The distribution files are kept in the `dist` branch. The tree you linked to is just for the example. We encourage consumers to download these files using Bower (`bower install scribe`)

[https://github.com/guardian/scribe/tree/dist](https://github.com/guardian/scribe/tree/dist)

<comment><USER11> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm so so glad.

Just two weeks ago I thought we'd have to implement the same thing for the same reasons: old editors were good in handling browser inconsistencies but bad in being too tightly coupled to their dated UIs, new editors sucked at generating semantic markup.

Thank you for making this public.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm hugely impressed by some of the open source code that comes out of the Guardian offices.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm...this may just be my favorite post on HN in a while... I have been working on a UI builder tool and have to some extent built the kind of functionality in this editor.

It looks, at least from first impression that you guys have done a much better job...hopefully it turns out to be the perfect solution my need..Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm a tad late, but I should mention a really important library I wrote that changes HOW one writes editors - [http://github.com/amark/monotype](http://github.com/amark/monotype) . Save your caret, do whatever transformation you want directly with HTML manipulation, then you restore your caret. Done, that simple - don't even bother trying to use the browser's API, because yes they are wildly unreliable in their behavior. The kicker with my library is it saves your caret (your selection) based on actual content, rather than the DOM tree, so it still is able to accurately restore it even if you completely delete and replace the DOM tree.

<comment><USER17> How does it work?

<comment><USER16> Just do:

monotype.save(editor);

Then perform your manipulation, when done call:

monotype.restore();

Tim Down! Thank you so much for your rangy library, it is a noble library, and I respect all your hard work trying to normalize the Range API. Monotype is similar to your new Text module but behaves a bit differently, please email me so we can talk more! mark at accelsor.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Shamelessly promoting my text selection and range API polyfill, [https://github.com/luwes/selection- polyfill](https://github.com/luwes/selection-polyfill)

Just to make clear, this would enable Scribe to work in older IE browsers.

<comment><USER12> Nice! What persuaded you to write this polyfill?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Guardian has a great approach to tech; they've done some really cool stuff with Scala / Play and released some great code.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised not to see Aloha editor [0] in their list of "Existing Solutions".

[0] - [http://www.aloha-editor.org/](http://www.aloha-editor.org/)

<comment><USER12> I should've added that! There are many…

<comment><USER21> And how about Codemirror? It's mainly used for monospace code editing and it's missing a UI and editing widgets, but the configurability and maturity should blow everything else out of the water. A demo showing it's not only usable for monospace fonts in a single font-size: [http://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html](http://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html)

<comment><USER22> I really like Codemirror, it was simple to get set up in [https://storytel.la/](https://storytel.la/) and easy to extend. I'm a few versions behind and didn't realise it handles mixed width fonts, so thanks for mentioning it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I suspect the best way to make rich text editing work across browsers is to do what the current google docs editor does: Drop contentEditable and just implement your own editor in javascript. Read key and mouse events and manipulate the DOM.

It's a bit more work up front, but possibly less work than trying to get four different implementations of contentEditable to behave the way you want. And this way you own the editing logic.

<comment><USER24> Do you know any good libraries that do this?

I tried building one a long time ago. The hard parts are mouse events (ie moving the caret based on a pixel coordinate) and pasting.

Google docs solves the mouse event problem by rendering every glyph offscreen and measuring it's bounding box. That is intensive and difficult if your font is bidi or changes by context (eg Arabic, accents). I tried wrapping every glyph in a span but it wiped out the available RAM. That may not be a problem anymore in 2014.

<comment><USER23> Honestly, I haven't looked into it. The bounding box thing sounds messy.

But on chrome, firefox, and probably safari, it appears that you can call document.getSelection() in a click handler, and the returned object will be an appropriate Caret selection with offset and node.

I recall that the selection object in older versions of IE do not offer the character offset, so you have to copy the selection and move it one character at a time until you get to the beginning of the text node. IE9 and above appear to have modern selection objects (according the MS docs). I don't know if they're updated onclick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone else notice how ridiculously bloated theguardian.com is? It seriously takes 5 seconds to completely load on my modern machine.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.theguardian.com/uk?view=mobile](http://www.theguardian.com/uk?view=mobile)

<comment><USER26> I thought it was interesting how they appear to have inlined the CSS and JS into the HTML for their new responsive site. Is this becoming a common practice?

I guess they must have worked out that their CSS and JS was lean and minified enough that despite the extra overhead of it being in the HTML (which is even less when gzipped, I guess) and not being served from cache, it was faster than making another 2 requests. I guess there is some small overhead to fetching a file from the browser cache but surely it is tiny?

Would be interested to get more insight into this aspect of the site if anyone knows anything!

<comment><USER27> There's a new trend to try and put the really important CSS rules inline so your content can render quickly then fill in the rest later without making the initial render look like it was designed by design blind programmers, i.e. the unmodified Times New Roman HTML page.

The Gruand is also trying progressive image loading.

Unfortunately it actually just looks shit, it's like peeking behind the curtains in Oz as your content kinda half renders then renders again properly, twitching into life like some sort of half botched Frankenstein experiment.

Notice the `loadFontsAsynchronously` and the `loadCssFromStorage` in the js.

In some ways I like that the Gruand's team is experimenting, in others it's frustrating to see how the creaky and leaky HTML/web browser combo is still justifying people doing all sorts of crazy things to try and get a simple page to render quickly 25 years after the web was born. And "responsive" designs that are really just mobile designs stretched to a one-size-fits-all simply because browsers are too fucking stupid to tell you what they actually need.

My Grump is in full swing today.

<comment><USER3> *Grauniad

<comment><USER28> The irony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm excited about using this in my next project. Love the fact they kept it simple with this one.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone using angularjs should seriously consider textAngular. I'm currently using it on an enewsletter editor app and it's pretty darn sweet.

[http://textangular.com/](http://textangular.com/)

<comment><USER12> It's easy enough to write a directive to plug Scribe in to Angular with bidirectional binding. I'll post an example soon, but it's simply a case of listening to content changes in Sribe and updating the Angular model using ng.NgModel.NgModelController.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hope the name is in homage to Scribe, the markup language and word processor. There was a time when you might write up your thesis in Scribe (even as, in parallel, some people chose LaTeX).

</comment><comment><USER32> I am shocked how misinformed and technically misleaded a pro team like the guardian is. Saving your stories in HTML in a CMS? This is like using Joomla for hobbiest sites or something like that, it will kill your archive and it will be a pain reusing content. A good Content Management Strategy is: use libreoffice for wirting, create a plugin that publish to archive and put articles in the pipeline for redaction, save content to docbook and be prepared for any kind of reuse of that content.

<comment><USER12> We only save inline text in HTML. Text "elements" along with any other media "elements" is stored as JSON and we attach metadata to each element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> nice to see someone trying to fix contenteditable as an api, thanks for the hard work and sharing it!

</comment><comment><USER34> This looks really nice. I can't wait to play with it on an upcoming project. Thanks to The Guardian for open sourcing it.

I'm curious what support on mobile is like. I tried the demo on my Nexus 7 and it worked well for the two minutes I played. However I skimmed the browserinconsistencies.md file and did not see any specific mention of mobile browsers. Mobile is a place where most of the existing solutions fall on their face. Having good mobile could really drive adoption.

<comment><USER12> I haven't done any testing on mobile, but we could add a few platforms to our integration tests to see what the support is like, perhaps! It would be good to test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> First of all, props of course to the Guardian's team, not only for devoting resources to improvement of the CMS field, but open-sourcing it...a concept that is still mostly alien to the modern newsroom.

As far as I know, the solution they have here is impressive and as good as the state-of-the-art, in terms of usability and modularity...but it still can't overcome the major quirks that come up with rich-text editors.

For example, I typed in the following in the demo ([http://guardian.github.io/scribe/](http://guardian.github.io/scribe/)):

Hello, _world_

 _Why italics?_

So the error here is that _after_ typing "world", I switched _off_ the italics and hit line break/Enter. However, the italics-mode persisted into the next line. This was the generated HTML:

Hello, world

Why italics?

As a programmer, I can appreciate why this might happen, and I know how to fix it...but this is the kind of unexpected behavior that is the bane of the layperson, so much so that with each new rich-text environment -- whether it be Word, Google Docs, TinyMCE, etc -- they have to come up with a whole new list of hacks to get around these quirks.

 _edit: the rest of this is address to a general "you", not to "you, the Guardian developers", as in, "why didn't you just do Markdown"...though if the Guardian took the lead in that, I'd most definitely upvote that too ;)_

I think rich-text editors are fine for the _very_ layperson. But I think for professional reporters, there needs to be a move toward the expectation that they all learn Markdown. Note, I'm not saying that everyone needs to learn HTML...but Markdown is basically the exact subset of text formatting a professional online writer needs to communicate 99.9% of their reportage material, with the rest being made up through plugins/shortcode/embed, as is currently the case for most online CMSes.

Markdown can be written in any editor and is portable to a huge variety of systems and services. More importantly, even without a specialized editor, Markdown still has human-friendly structure. What else does a writer need?

Before you say: _oh but we can 't expect our writers to learn code-like things_...this is not true at all. As an intern at the Denver Post, I spent at least a day learning the in-house editor, which was Windows-only, designed for the print-publishing workflow, and had all manner of arcane key combinations to add editing marks (again, for print, and not the web). Everyone was expected to learn it, and everyone did fine.

But unlike Markdown, this in-house closed source coding system was...well, shitty as most industry-specific codes are...and once in awhile someone would accidentally "un-hide" notes meant for an editor's eyes only, which would then show up in print. What I love about Markdown is that you don't even have to really know it to write what you need...hitting Enter creates a paragraph break, both in your text editor and the platform to which you publish. How much easier can you get?

<comment><USER12> The behaviour you describe around italics is completely native to the browser, so it will at least be consistent across uses of `contentEditable`. I agree that it is annoying, but there were much bigger fish to fry ([https://github.com/guardian/scribe/blob/87d3ed1a7f28d9fcdcc0...](https://github.com/guardian/scribe/blob/87d3ed1a7f28d9fcdcc0a54e0d168dbeac26e558/BROWSERINCONSISTENCIES.md)).

You make some very good points about Markdown, and we spent awhile thinking about whether to go down that road or not. Although there is a technical barrier to access for Markdown, that's not the reason we decided against it. Maybe we should do another blog post to follow up with more details regarding our decisions. (Or, I'll come here with more details in just a bit.)

<comment><USER36> So, assuming unlimited developer time, you would want Scribe to correct this?

I'm just trying to get a feel of Scribe's scope... Does it want to fix all inconsistencies, even pure UI irritants, or is it mostly about ensuring correct content?

I'm tempted to write a plugin that "types" space-delete after every CR. That's the quickest and nastiest fix I can think of...

<comment><USER12> Can you add an issue here ([https://github.com/guardian/scribe/issues](https://github.com/guardian/scribe/issues)) and we can talk solutions? I have a few in mind!

Generally speaking, it should patch behaviour to the point where it doesn't get in the way of the user and produces clean and semantic markup. We have found that patching some of the smaller behaviour obscurities would not be trivial. If it matters to the community though, we (the open source community) can definitely get them patched!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is quite simply stunning.

I've used ckeditor 4 recently and found that pretty impressive (it was a system for a company of charity workers, not a hope in hell that markdown was going to happen) and it was good enough.

This looks like something I'd use for my _own_ stuff.

</comment><comment><USER38> Does anyone know why Chrome uses   (non-breaking-space) before and after inline tags such as anchor and italics? This behavior causes lines to sometime break much sooner than needed.

</comment><comment><USER39> Any links to see a demo?

<comment><USER40> [http://guardian.github.io/scribe/](http://guardian.github.io/scribe/)</comment></comment>


Time Travel with Git for TDD - <AUTHOR> http://ardell.posterous.com/time-travel-with-git

<comment><USER2> So if the ritual components aren't spelled out in the version history in exactly the right order, the voodoo spell doesn't work? Or is your OCD just wasting a bunch of your time?</comment>


Comparing gzip, brotli and zstd - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/ymmt2005/89f27b040796248e8133d1f076ab9536 <comment><USER2> wow, 10x faster decompression ? I have to check that ...</comment>


Richard Feynman distilled - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

<comment><USER2> you'd gain significantly more by reading a single, whole essay than by browsing that page of sound bites.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with that.

In general all the posts could be serving as pointers to something deeper and with more content. I guess that is what this post does too.

Feynman's contributions to physics, essay writing, teaching could definitely can not be exhausted in a single post.</comment></comment>


The Verge Hires Writer Who Quit CNET in Protest - <AUTHOR> http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/the-verge-hires-writer-who-quit-cnet-in-protest/ <comment><USER2> I enjoy reading The Verge but I don't believe that they're any less vulnerable to advertising influences than CNET/CBS.

Their gaming site Polygon ran afoul of this <http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497693> [http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/30/3575978/halo-4-avatar- cost...](http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/30/3575978/halo-4-avatar-costume- offered-free-from-u-k-pizza-huts#124515407)

Essentially one of their first "articles" was just a copy/pasted press release from Pizza Hut for Halo 4. When people began calling them out on it in their comments, rather than take the link down and post a 'mea culpa', they began censoring the posts and then later deny there was even a controversy because they didn't receive any money from Pizza Hut for it.

Oh wait except they took $750K from Microsoft (aka the IP owners of Halo 4) to make their "teaser trailer" for the website.

Some would say that it's SOP for gaming websites to just copy/paste press releases but I say if you're going to call yourself something different and do "game journalism" with ethics, you shouldn't be doing stuff like this.

It makes me really think twice about any articles on The Verge regarding Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> I used to read The Verge and i don't think I've ever seen many articles or reviews related to Microsoft shown in good light, for example even when most other sites reported Gmail active sync support being dropped as a bad move, The Verge reported that as Microsoft not supporting open standards (which was true) and in the review of the Nokia Lumia 920 the camera was rated the same as an iPad camera with the reasoning that the quality was not needed and cameras like the iPhone's were what customers really wanted

tl;dr they never jump on MS bandwagons

<comment><USER4> You mean except the most important review of them all - the Windows 8 review, which got an 8.8 score, and was written by a guy who used to write Microsoft- related articles?

The Lumia and Surface RT reviews which were written by Joshua himself were far more objective and fair, because he was ultimately right about them. Look how many people are returning the Surface now, unsatisfied with their experience with it (more than 40%).

<comment><USER3> > You mean except the most important review of them all - the Windows 8 > review, which got an 8.8 score, and was written by a guy who used to write > Microsoft-related articles?

yes that would be one, but that does not refute what i said.

>> It makes me really think twice about any articles on The Verge regarding Microsoft.

I was asserting that The Verge do not seem to be partial to MS and i think i'm justified in saying that.

>The Lumia and Surface RT reviews which were written by Joshua himself were far more objective and fair

True but it's just not the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably one of the best technology news websites to work for at the moment. The Verge is definitely my goto site for tech news nowadays, the quality of the writing as well as thought and effort that goes into the articles is second to none. Greg Sandoval is a great writer and undoubtedly a smart hire from The Verge who not only have a chance to attract a few new users, but also a great new writer who understands the industry.

<comment><USER6> Another great thing that The Verge has going for it is the layout and design of their articles. In an AMA on reddit [1], a member of the Vox Media Product Team said they actually have the writers do a basic layout of their article (with full text and everything), then another dedicated designer to further refine it. I've never read of any other sites doing this, so I found it quite interesting.

 _We built a snippet system for our long-form features. Imagine a regular WYSIWYG editor where the author can insert "snippets" like "picture on left" or "full width overlay", and then they add whatever text and images they like. From there, the feature writer will work with a dedicated designer to further hone the look and feel of the piece with custom SCSS inclusion._

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/12gm3c/vox_media...](http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/12gm3c/vox_media_product_team_builders_of_sb_nation/c6uvgzh)

<comment><USER7> The design of the homepage is pretty awful, in my opinion. It lags on anything a few years old and the multiple columns make it hard to pick out articles. I don't read The Verge specifically because I think the homepage is terrible.

I'm equally annoyed with ArsTechnica's three column layout. I either have to skim titles horizontally which is confusing because each column is a different category, or scroll down, back up, down again, back up, etc. just to look at all the headlines.

People read left to right, top to bottom. The homepage layout should follow that pattern. Anything else is counter-intuitive.

<comment><USER8> I thought "how bad can it be" and opened the homepage on my netbook. The browser loaded stuff for about 10 seconds and then froze for another 10-20 until the page was rendered.

<comment><USER9> If you have the hardware, The Verge is nicely designed, almost as well as Ars. But people who don't like Tiles and prefer flat lists might not like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think he'll fit right in there.

<http://www.theverge.com/ethics-statement>

</comment><comment><USER11> I also like <http://thetechblock.com/> quality stuff on there.</comment>


DSP - demand side platform - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I really don't mean to ask such a noob question, but I can't figure out for the life of me what a DSP really is. I've spent 3 full days googling everything possible and I still can't really pin point what it is a DSP does. If anyone can provide any insight, please share.
Thanks all, Nico <comment><USER2> "DSP" is a term for an service that connects to multiple ad inventory sources (ad exchanges, ad networks, etc) and allows an advertiser to upload their creative media and targeting criteria once and then be able to buy on all the different inventory sources that the DSP integrates at once. The "demand-side" refers to the fact that DSPs (Invite Media, Turn, DataXu, etc) are used by advertisers to buy inventory, as opposed to the "supply-side", which are the publishers (web sites) or their representatives (ad networks, Rubicon, Pubmatic, etc) that have the inventory slots which the DSP is to fill. In display advertising, "supply" is code for people (they call it "audience") and "demand" is code for money.

All of this works via the magic of RTB (real-time bidding) APIs which certain ad exchanges and networks implement that allows a DSP to see and bid on each individual impression right before it is rendered in real-time. It works as follows:

* An end user loads a web page in his browser with an RTB-enabled ad tag on it

* Ad tag loads and calls back to its origin (e.g. Google AdX) for a creative to show

* The origin initiates a real-time auction with all of its partners (DSPs or Appnexus(+)) to find a creative to show

* The origin will send each partner a bid request containing such information as the origin IP address, geographical information, site on which the tag is placed, etc

* The partner searches its inventory for a matching creative(s)

* The partner picks one to bid on and chooses a bid price to offer

* It sends that back to the origin

* The origin chooses the winner of the auction and then:

* Sends the winning creative tag back to the publisher's ad tag to be shown

* Debits the winning partner's account by the amount bid (or something less, depending on the auction model)

* The ad loads in the browser and the end user is pissed off that he has yet to enable AdBlock

As for who offers RTB APIs, those are typically ad exchanges, SSPs ("supply- side platforms", also known as "yield optimizers", e.g. Rubicon, Pubmatic, AdMeld) and some ad networks. The largest ad exchange, Yahoo! RightMedia, has yet to offer an RTB API yet, although they are purported to be working on it.

DSPs will typically use the information provided in the bid request to help aid the bidding decision but also they rely heavily on third-party data sources for extra information about the user and the publisher domain/URL in order to maximize the likelihood of offering a relevant ad for the cheapest price. Proximic, BlueKai, Exelate, Bizo, TARGUSInfo and many more offer specialized data streams for this purpose.

DSPs serve as aggregators of RTB-enabled inventory sources for advertisers so that they can buy across all of them without having to manage N sets of creatives, N sets of bids, N sets of targeting criteria, N relationships, etc. This allows advertisers to concentrate on the audience they want to reach and not where to find them. Having said that, the larger brand advertisers will typically use an ad agency and not deal with DSPs directly; the agency will use a DSP on their behalf and charge a markup for the service. This is typically called "execution" in the same vein as "execution of trades". DSPs are the algo traders of the online ad world.

(+) I mention Appnexus separately because they are not technically a DSP. While they do connect to the RTB APIs of many of the inventory sources and can serve as a DSP, they are a primarily a platform on which to create a DSP or some other real-time-enabled ad processing engine. Many of the DSPs out there are just whitelabeled Appnexus, in that they use Appnexus' bidder and UI for their "DSP". Appnexus also has exchange-like properties, e.g. they have inventory exclusive to themselves (i.e. what used to be called Microsoft AdECN) that is only available by integrating with them/using their platform.

(++) Full disclosure: I was Invite Media's first Chief Architect and I continue to work in the online ad business today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, thank you! I love the step through in the bullets. I can follow what's going on much more clearly now. The AdBlock comment was hilarious.</comment></comment>


Future Dating App Algorithms Are Unsexy but Brutally Effective - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/the-future-of-online-dating-is-unsexy-and-brutally-effe-1819781116 <comment><USER2> People that use dating apps become the most shallow versions of themselves by and large. Women all go for men that are 8s and above and even women that are 5s and below get it so they never settle for men below that in the hopes they can one day get the 8 again.

It is a ruined system that will never work. You have to fix this problem away from electronics.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a25414-the- alph...](https://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a25414-the-alpha-widow- how-they-come-to-be)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"We found in China users who like a very, um, demure type of individual." This he mentions in a tone which seems to imply a stereotype I'm unaware of._

I'm too naive to get this joke - can anyone explain it to me?</comment>


Ask pg: Should I be more active on HN? - <AUTHOR>

We're working on building a pretty cool startup (if I do say so myself) and will be applying to the summer HN batch.  I've noticed that YC people (especially pg) are saying that activity on HN is a good way to raise visibility for your application [0 (also one of his essays, can't figure out which one)].  Like usual, there's no statistics, so I'm asking here.
I'm not very active on HN, using it to drive attention to my blog [1] and the occasional comment.  I've got complete confidence that we'll be accepted if we can make it to the interview, but I'm a bit worried about standing out among the thousands of other applicants to make it to the interview.
Should I spend more time saying "smart things" on HN?  I'd rather work on improving our startup but my priority is getting YC's attention.
Essentially, is the extra visibility provided by commenting worth the time now to get the benefit of YC later?
[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133608
[1] http://recoding.blogspot.com <comment><USER2> Work on your startup.

There's no better way to get YC's attention than applying with a startup which is seeing strong user growth/revenue in a large (or potentially large) market.

<comment><USER3> I second that. Being active on HN or anywhere else on the internet can help buzz, credibility, and promotion of your startup. But at the end of the day, only two things count: product and company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want people to know about you and your product? Great then the first thing you want to do is to make sure that you have a great product that people will love and it won't be just buzz and promotion. I don't say that being active on the internet will harm you, but it may take away some of the time you would work on the startup. So the choice is all yours, but in my opinion the answer is somewhere in the middle, like starting to promote yourself and the startup after you are starting to be in the last stages of release so you could build a buzz for it and help with the first weeks.</comment>


The Untold Story of Larry Page's Comeback (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4 <comment><AUTHOR> Past discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114)</comment>


Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-tiktok-have-held-preliminary-talks-about-possible-combination-11596925449 <comment><USER3> The United States' brand is that we are an open, dynamic, stable place to do business in. If you have capital its safe here because of our respect of the rule of law, and private property rights. We should strive to be the best place on earth to do business in. We are an open country and we benefit from being open. We benefit from competition. We are literally richer by definition - when business like TikTok choose to operate in the United States.

The decision to force transfer of business undermines our country's brand and our reputation. It's sad that Twitter is participating in this shake down.

I posted this in another thread and colorfully illustrates that Twitter is no better than what they accuse TikTok of being.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24095334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24095334)

<comment><USER4> United States' brand has been damaged by our own doing. Specifically, the executives that paid off the politicians whose job was to ensure a level playing field in terms of trade. I am really convinced of the following, open for critiques:

US Executives paid off politicians who then allowed trade deficit to pile up, we saw one of the biggest wealth transfers in the history of mankind - Some 30 trillion dollars of growth in China. Whatever was returned then went into American executives' who made sure that the median wages were as low as possible (paid off politicians again) which lead to massive wealth inequality here domestically.

I think the people to blame are not executives. These are the wolves. The real assholes of America are the politicians, both left and right, who put their own interest before public's. Infrastructure, education, building the nation to be capable to compete was put aside, instead they promoted consumerism, big-fat American dream and laughed off to their multimillion dollar estates.

You make a good point about rule of law - yes, it is in favor of big corp. Not for medium and small businesses. Italy has some ridiculous % of GDP coming from companies less than 50 employees. I forgot what that % is, but it is like 50% or more.

This is what America could have been. A powerhouse of innovation, extremely motivated workforce, excellent education system and health system, virtually no poverty and infrastructure could be unlike any other nation.

Living here in Silicon Valley, it feels like a crumbling place ridden with crime, feces and homeless people everywhere. Depressing.

<comment><USER5> _we saw one of the biggest wealth transfers in the history of mankind - <USER2> 30 trillion dollars of growth in China._

Economic growth is not the same as a wealth transfer. It's not a zero sum game.

<comment><USER4> It is an opportunity cost though, no? That wealth could have resulted in domestic progress.

If I am making Jeans in 1995 in America, but in 2000 I lay off workers, shut down cotton fields, dying processes, etc. and off shore it, while hiring 2 people instead of 50 - to manage suppliers, that indeed, unquestionably has resulted in loss of wealth.

Can you explain how this would be a zero sum game? I know @naval keeps tooting that and it makes sense to me in macroeconomically, but I can't convince myself - I think of a closed thermodynamic system with system energy = work done + heat transfer out. That's how I think of the economic systems too when it comes to microeconomics.

<comment><USER5> My comment was more that it's _not_ a zero sum game and that a significant part of China's growth was not at the expense of the US (but part of it obviously was).

By offshoring the manufacturing of jeans, American jobs were lost, correct. But presumably the cost of manufacturing was lowered which opened up new markets (can charge less and still make a profit) and those profits flowed back into the US. And at the same time, American consumers benefited by lower cost jeans (whether price decrease or a slowing of price increases).

The Chinese benefited because they were get a piece of that overall value chain - the manufacturing part.

<comment><USER6> Pretty Much - I seem to remember an Economist article talking about how the 2000's saw some of the largest gains for the middle class globally, with China's middle class being one of the contributing factors.

But you're right, jobs are not zero sum either. They create new jobs, which in turn create other new jobs, and so forth. If they didn't, we'd all pretty much be unemployed except for farmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth constantly re-iterating that Vine [1] was shutdown by Twitter in 2017 back when Twitter was losing a lot of cash. It was available for any tech company to purchase for pennies on the dollar and was losing $10 million/month to run [2].

Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for short looping videos before it shutdown. Previously users have suggested Vine used a follow/subscribe-model and was not algorithmic like TikTok, but adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have been that hard.

It's been reported Microsoft is looking at buying TikTok with some investors valuing the company at $30-$70 billion. [3] That number is high in the context of this latest WSJ article, which says Twitter has $7.8 billion in cash and a market cap of $29 billion.

However, TikTok reportedly earned $5.6 billion in revenue in Q1 2020 [4], and reportedly made a $3 billion net profit in 2019 [5]. It those numbers are correct then TikTok (which often called a Vine clone, and Vine 2.0) has grown bigger than Twitter itself.

This leapfrog happened in an era of cash-rich Silicon Valley software companies, where investment funding is easily obtainable.

It's worth reflecting deeply on this turn of events, and why Vine was allowed to wither and die, only for a better executed clone immediately take over and dominate.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_\(service\))

[2] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/revive- vine](https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/revive-vine)

[3] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-for-a-deal-to- bu...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-for-a-deal-to-buy-tiktoks- u-s-business-11596418842)

[4] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-results- idUSKBN...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-results- idUSKBN23O114)

[5] [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance- profit.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html)

<comment><USER8> > _adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have > been that hard_

I'm not convinced this is true. TikTok's algorithmic "For You Page" is _astonishingly_ good. Somehow TikTok manages to zero in on stuff relevant to users extremely quickly, and without relying on spamming a lot of general interest popular content. I created a TikTok account recently and literally within minutes I was getting an extremely personalized FYP (For You Page) without even following anyone. If my wife and I compare our FYPs we'll find virtually no overlap (possibly a few cat videos but that's it). I've never seen anyone else do an algorithmic feed even half as good as this. Everyone else seems to rely on just spamming you with general-interest popular videos and hope you'll find enough people to follow to fill out the feed yourself. TikTok's FYP isn't even driven by follows, that's a separate feed.

<comment><USER7> Try opening YouTube in an incognito tab and start watching a few videos (on say, cooking). You'll notice the recommended videos on the homepage gets very accurate very fast.

The algorithms behind recommendation engines are well understood. Companies can and do invest huge amounts into making their algorithms better and it yes, it definitely takes a lot of effort to tweak and refine the algorithm to make the overall experience addictive and relevant.

But the seemingly widely held idea that TikTok builds better recommendation algorithms than other companies (including Facebook's News Feed) doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny.

<comment><USER9> Twitter does not appear to have a recommendation algorithm worth a damn.

<comment><USER10> Content, no. Ads, when it really counts ($), yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get how twitter and msft could buy just the US operations of a company like tiktok... like do the developers and PMs still work in China and then twitter just helps maintain the servers. Or does the app diverge into 2 apps at that point with 2 separate dev teams?

<comment><USER12> There are already separate apps for China and non-China users (and android is split across Europe).

<comment><USER13> > and android is split across Europe

What does that mean?

<comment><USER12> There's one app that's available in some European countries and a separate one for others.

I don't remember the exact breakdown, but I believe one covers some of the Asian countries (where Google Play is available)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this help the problem of ~3 companies dominating social media in the US? Congress just derided Facebook's ability to acquire Instagram in a public hearing a week ago, and now this feels like a similar play. It's a shame that TikTok has the baggage of being funded by China, because otherwise they created a great app that's so far been able to rapidly rise and compete against the incumbents. We need more of that.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Vine killers combining with the Vine successors?

</comment><comment><USER16> I already made it

Twiktwok.github.io

<comment><USER17> That's awesome. It'd be interesting to see this applied as a general way to browse videos across the open web. Like StumbleUpon for videos.

<comment><USER16> Good idea. I could add reddit video next

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why doesn't Twitter just resurrect Vine? They literally have all the source code.

<comment><USER19> Maybe management don't want to admit to shareholders that they made a horrible mistake.

<comment><USER6> The brand is dead, which is important for social network apps. Relaunching would peak interest for a few weeks before quickly becoming a second mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I actually prefer Twitter than MSFT

After all, they had Vine back then

<comment><USER21> and managed it terribly, and shut it down to the disappointment of many.

MSFT is a much better business, and have the cash to back a long strategy imho.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft also mismanaged skype. They're an enterprise software company, not B2C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Along the same lines as "Scientists consider crossing Ebola with Influenza to create the most deadly and most contagious disease ever!"</comment>


How Guy Kawasaki Manages His Time  - <AUTHOR> http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2014/03/12/how-guy-kawasaki-manages-his-time-interview/ <comment><USER2> Not what I was anticipating. Interesting to learn more about what make this guy tick.

</comment><comment><USER3> "I play hockey from 11:30 to 1:15" yeah, me too...

Skip this article.</comment>


Ask HN:How many day traders/investors are here? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if there was many day traders or investors here, I've a lose interest in day trading that at 1 point in my life I'd like to take further.
So if you're a day trader my questions for you are: 1:How did you get started?
2:What amount of capital did you start with?
3:Are you strictly a day trader or do you hold intra-day positions, swing trade, trade on the FX market or/and invest traditionally
4:What would be some good resources for a beginner?
5:What would you say your average amount of daily profit/loss is
6:Do you enjoy your job?
Also, first HN submission :). <comment><USER2> A couple of resources for you:

[http://traderfeed.blogspot.com](http://traderfeed.blogspot.com) [http://www.brettsteenbarger.com](http://www.brettsteenbarger.com)</comment>